Hyacinth

Our friends, when they came for dinner recently, brought us a hyacinth, which is now blooming. Beautiful flower! And, it has a long pedigree for beauty. I ran across the following in the Odyssey, describing how Odysseus was prepared to meet the King of the Phaecians:

Athena, the gray-eyed goddess, made him more robust and taller; and she gave him thicker hair, which flowed down from his head in curls and clusters that seemed much like the hyacinth in flower. Just as a craftsman who has learned his secrets from both the gray-eyed godeess and Hephaestus frames silver with fine gold and thus creates a work with greater plenitude and grace, so did the goddess now enhance with grace the head and shoulders of Odysseus. Then by the sea he sat apart, a man handsome and radiant. [Hom. Od. 6.225]

(quoted from the book All Things Shining, by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, p. 77.) The authors point out that the Greek word for "grace" is charis, the root of our word charismatic. They point out that a charismatic person is literally "one who has been favored by the gods with a gift of grace or talent. The charismatic person lights up a room, as, for instance, the great Russian ballet dancer Nureyev was said to do."

As the U2 song "Grace" says, "Grace finds beauty in everything, finds goodness, makes beautiful ugly things . . ."

Philip Rieff (in his book Charisma) says that more and more today, the true charismatic is the "unrecognized one," that is, recognized only by a few who can see. Charisma represents the grace of the divine, the true life of God, expressed in truth and adherence to order and goodness, and opposed to the modern conception of charisma as, so often seen, a loose life "graced with" celebrity. (I make no judgment but its worth asking which charisma Nureyev represented. Maybe both.)

The hyacinth in my house now reminds me of charis, grace, that adorned the head of Odysseus, and that I pray might grace my head (and the rest of me)!

Listen to Debbie Boone, "You Light Up My Life"

Listen to U2 "Grace"

Another version of "Grace" (with images of a true charismatic, Mother Teresa)